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The following is a lightly edited transcript of the July 7 episode of the Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.In the run-up to Donald Trump’s gala celebrating the nation’s 250th anniversary, we’ve been arguing here that it was important for it to fail. Trump delivered his speech, and there were some pretty bad highlights, but perhaps most notably it was beset with chaos after Trump overruled officials who recommended calling it off amid storms causing an exodus from the Mall. But we’re going to dig deeper into the bigger failures here.This was the moment when we were supposed to celebrate the American experiment enduring for a quarter of a millennium, and Trump still couldn’t help but make it all about the crowd sizes that were supposedly there for him and all about his pet obsessions. We’re talking about all of it with New Republic senior editor Alex Shephard, because Alex predicted very early on that Donald Trump would lose the culture, including on this, on the celebration of the 250th. Alex, good to have you back.Alex Shephard: It’s great to be back.Sargent: So what we now know is that Trump finally delivered his speech after 11 p.m. on July 4, after what The Washington Post called a “chaotic scramble.” This was the result of officials essentially saying this thing should be canceled and then him overruling them. Trump claims 150,000 people were there in the end, while saying that at least twice or three times as many had been there before the evacuation. Alex, you saw the imagery of the empty seats. What’s your take on the claim of 150,000 for the speech?Shephard: I mean, there have been a lot of ridiculous Trump crowd-size claims, but I think this is one of the more brazen ones. The VIP section of this speech wasn’t even full. It was half full by the middle of the speech. People that love Trump and that need things from Trump weren’t willing to stay the entire time. The weather was awful, but I think mostly people did not want to sit through what Trump had promised to be a very long speech. It wasn’t actually that long—I think it was like 30, 35 minutes. But it was exactly what you would expect. It was this kind of endless recitation of the familiar grievances, with a few kind of new half-baked insults thrown in. So it just felt exactly like a perfect encapsulation of where we are with this president right now. Somebody who’s just almost bored, I think, with it, but who has no real argument to make to the American people and is still just kind of falling back on these very, very tired arguments.Sargent: And of course, crowd sizes were really essential for Trump. Leading up to it, there was reporting saying that he had been in absolute rage about pictures of the crowd sizes during the events leading up to this. They had really set him off quite miserably in many ways.Shephard: Well, I think going back to that too, there’s this larger failure of the Great American State Fair project, this kind of idea that they were supposed to put on almost like a world’s fair on the National Mall. It increasingly got taken over by Trump people. And between the weather and, I think, the lack of real draws, you were just seeing nobody coming through here. And I think that again, like, the president can be furious about this as much as he wants, but it’s just another example of him living in this total fantasy world. It’s like when he posts about polls where 70 percent of the people love him. It’s just absurd.Sargent: It is. Well, let’s check out what Trump said during the speech about the size of his crowd. Listen.Donald Trump (voiceover): And they estimated they had 375,000 people before everybody had to leave. And they now have 150,000 people. It’s the craziest thing anyone’s ever seen. At least.Sargent: But then on Truth Social afterwards, he suddenly inflated the number. He said, “The crowd at 7:05 in the evening was 422,000 people.”Shephard: I mean, I think it also gives it a sort of historic register, right? He wants this to be like the March on Washington. He wants this to be like—I don’t know, when they tried to levitate the Pentagon or something. But I think what you’re seeing is the president trying, like, really, really hard to use his theoretical superpower, which is to just manufacture reality, right? He’s a disciple of the power of positive thinking. He believes he can just kind of manipulate reality by saying things, and that by the time people correct him, it’ll be too late. But I think what we’ve seen again and again, especially since the start of this year, is that he’s just totally lost that ability, right? He can just say this stuff and people just ignore it. It doesn’t matter anymore.Sargent: I mean, it’s almost like one final humiliation for him to not only only get 150,000 by his own invented estimation, but that’s actually this huge bump down from this bigger number that he estimated—and then he turns around and undermines even that bigger number by inventing another one.Shephard: I think Trump at his best, in a kind of non-value-judgment way, is sort of like the Grateful Dead or something, where people are going because there might be these parts that are not very good, but there’s going to be 20 or 30 minutes that are genuinely surprising and new and interesting. And I think that’s like what brought people into Trump in ’15 and ’16. And I think now you’re seeing Trump as the Grateful Dead when Jerry Garcia was on loads of heroin or something—it’s just very familiar and it doesn’t work at all. And I think people are just bored by it right now.Part of it is that he’s the president, right? So he’s just repeating the same kind of points over and over again. But I think that what we’re seeing is just a president that’s not actually engaged with people or with the culture in a larger way. And the speech itself, to me, failed on numerous grounds. But I think one of the reasons why people were not coming is just, it was this really familiar recitation of grievances, and kind of really pro forma points that Trump himself doesn’t even really care about.Sargent: So let’s talk about a few highlights here. Trump claimed that we built the “Empire of Liberty.” He slurred his speech numerous times, a lot of screwups. He actually talked about the need to end mail balloting, which is really, truly bizarre. Talk about grievances—that’s something that a lot of Republicans don’t want to hear him talk about anymore. And then there’s one quote that really leapt out, I think. It was this: “As our Declaration of Independence tells you, we’re all made in the image of one Almighty God, and a communist will never say that.”Alex, to you, what substantively about the speech really kind of jumped out?Shephard: I think part of it to me—or the big part, you just got at it—was this really new move from Trump, which is to try to kind of reenergize the Cold War, or to sort of make the larger fight for the country one of capitalism against communism. Essentially the idea here seems to be to use Mamdani as the kind of symbol of the Democratic Party heading into the midterms. But part of the issue here is—and maybe I’ll just sound like Barack Obama in the debate against Mitt Romney, but I’m like, the Cold War was a long time ago, right?And one of the reasons why—and you see this—I think Steve Bannon is not somebody whose word should be taken literally most of the time, but I thought he had a very interesting point about the rise of kind of democratic socialism after the Colorado results last week, where he was essentially saying, Yeah, you know what, these people are speaking to people who are dissatisfied with our current politics, right? And they’re organizing really effectively around that. And I think that with Trump, what’s notable here is that Trump first rose speaking to a similar kind of person, right? Somebody who’s disaffected, somebody who is, I think, fairly concerned about the corruption of our politics and looking for people who don’t fit the mold of regular politicians. And that was Trump for a while, right?But now Trump is himself trying to say, No, I am the kind of symbol of capitalism—all while running the most corrupt and crony-filled administration that you’ve ever seen. And I think that to me points to somebody who’s just lost his touch to some extent. This is the laziest argument that you can make in politics, essentially: My opponents are all communists, right? Well, people like Mamdani—he’s made himself a kind of very approachable, kind force in American politics and I think has actually organized really effectively, in a way that Trump has as well. But I think what we’re seeing here is just this effort to kind of narrativize his way out of this mess. And the narrative that he’s offering is one that Republicans have been pushing since Barry Goldwater, right? And sometimes it works, but most of the time it doesn’t.Sargent: That’s absolutely right. I want to home in a little bit on his characterization of the Declaration of Independence, though. When he says, “We are all made in the image of one Almighty God,” he’s referring to the fact that the Declaration says we hold these truths to be self-evident, that our creator made all people equal and so forth. But Trump very much invisibly dispenses with the equal part. And also, “our creator” is not the same as “one Almighty God.” “Our creator” is a much more generic way of putting it, which is deliberate. He’s turning this into almost like a Christian nationalist celebration in a sense.Shephard: Yeah, I mean, I think that Thomas Jefferson certainly would be appalled by that, right? Like, as a deist, he was not somebody who was thinking about our creator endowing us with anything. I think that the idea here for Trump is that the white men who founded this country did so with very clear designs in that order, that align with the sort of Pete Hegseth vision. And again, I think that speaks to a weakness within this administration, to me—that Trump is parroting stuff that he doesn’t care about, right? He’s not a Christian nationalist. He’s just doing this to try to pander to people within his base, right? And whenever Trump sounds like Pete Hegseth, I feel like he’s really losing here overall.And I think again, we’re just seeing this kind of laziness, right? It’s this really warmed-over version of Republican politics, really like kind of mainstream Republican politics. As bad as the Christian nationalism stuff has gotten, a lot of the content of this speech would be familiar in a bad speech given by any Republican politician for the last sixty years. And ordinarily you would say, OK, well, that’s fine. But the problem is that Trump’s whole thing is he’s not like those other people. So this speech, I think, to me captures the two halves of what we’re seeing with Trump right now, which are, on the one hand, these really finely ground grievances like the SAVE Act, right, that most people do not care about, things that Trump cares about quite a bit. And then on the other half, it’s just this really familiar drivel that has sort of characterized the conservative movement and the Republican Party for decades. And I think when you combine these two, you get, one, just a really boring speech, but you also get a picture of a presidency that’s in total free fall.Sargent: And let’s point out that Barack Obama spoke at the dedication of his presidential center just around a month ago. I want to read a sentence from his speech, because I think it’s really applicable here. It’s sort of fortuitous that Obama’s speech came around a month before Trump’s display, because they really neatly bookend this moment in a really kind of telling way. Obama said that the “story of America at its best” rests on “shared values that make democracy possible.”They include this: “a belief in the intrinsic dignity and worth of all people and that no one is above the law or beneath its protection, a belief in checks and balances in our government … a belief that our military and law enforcement owe allegiance not to any president or political party, but to the people and our Constitution.”You know, Alex, there was a time when a Republican president, whether he would mean it or not, would say something quite like that. But of course, let’s be clear—it’s a defining fact of this moment that Trump and MAGA don’t accept any of those things to be true, what Obama said, right?Shephard: Yeah, I mean, I think it’s part of the long run of Republican and Democratic presidents giving speeches that subtextually rebuke Trump in this exact way, right? Like, George H.W. Bush could have given a large part of what you just read as well. But that’s I think one of the other things that really jumps out about this moment, and in some ways the tragedy of Trump being president at this moment—there are many worse things that are happening. But one of them, I think, is that this is an opportunity to reflect on the actual meaning of this nation. And I think it’s one of the things that Obama does very well. It’s something that actually Mayor Mamdani here in New York City, I think, also did very well in a speech that he gave on July 3 that was largely about immigration as part of the American story. But there’s just been this refusal to engage with that kind of narrativizing, right? Which I think is an important part of building a culture.And I think what you see with Trump is that he’s only capable of essentially either, when things are going well for him, building a political movement, or, I think, attempting to sustain or salvage it, which is what we’re seeing now. And it’s just the political movement, right? It’s only things that are innate to Trump. And as you’ve mentioned, the Declaration of Independence is hostile to that project, right? Like the Reconstruction Amendments are hostile to that project. When you think about the larger American story—which Obama has narrativized, I think, brilliantly many times, of a country struggling to live up to the ideals in its founding documents—that’s, I think, a powerful story. But that’s not the story that Trump tells, right? The story that Trump tells is, these people won’t pass the SAVE Act, and so my elections are going to keep getting stolen.Sargent: You’ve got the World Cup really sort of acting as the perfect foil to Donald Trump’s Christian nationalist display of our 250th. Can you talk about the contrast there?Shephard: For the most part, what you’ve seen in this World Cup is it being a celebration of the kinds of things that Obama talked about in that speech, that I think you look at when you think about the good parts of America, right? People are really friendly here. People like to visit America, and they like to visit it because of Americans and because of American culture. And I think we’ve seen quite a bit of that. And this tournament has largely been a huge refutation of Trumpism.The best player for the United States Men’s National Team during this tournament is somebody who is only a U.S. citizen because of birthright citizenship. It’s a huge refutation of the president. But what we’ve seen since Sunday, when that player, Folarin Balogun, who had been suspended, that he gets unsuspended, possibly because of lobbying from the White House, and the president certainly takes credit for it. And I think what you see is, it’s not that dissimilar to when Trump came to New York for game three of the NBA Finals. What you see is a sort of party, right? This sort of joyous thing that’s then poisoned by the president.But I think it’s more notable here too, in that it’s another example of his weakness culturally, right? Like, the U.S. team is doing really well, but Trump doesn’t own that at all—partly because, again, the striker on this team, Folarin Balogun, is on the team because of birthright citizenship. His backup, Ricardo Pepi, his family is Mexican, right? The left back is English, the right back is Dutch. It’s a complicated story of America, but it’s one that refutes what the president’s trying to say. And I think with this sort of eleventh-hour intervention, what you’re seeing from this president is someone who can’t own the narrative. So he has to force his way in. And I think that’s what we’ve seen here.And the U.S. will play Belgium after we talk, before this episode goes out. But I think that the team may or may not respond to that. Hopefully they are able to kind of compartmentalize it. But for a lot of people—and I wrote about this for the New Republic site today—this has kind of poisoned the World Cup. And that, I think, is what Donald Trump has been doing culturally for the last year and a half, essentially. He’s just kind of butted into things and ruined them.Sargent: And just to conclude this, Donald Trump is clearly trying to associate himself with the success of the World Cup, but failing. And I think the dynamic that you’re getting at is really that everyone just wants to be done with this guy and done with this movement already, right? Everybody just at this point sees how toxic Trump and Trumpism have really become as toxic forces in American life. I mean, the ethnonationalism, the cruelties and the barbarities, the corruption, the self-dealing, the oligarchy, right? The big upward transfer of oligarchic wealth, which was a major component of Trump’s second-term agenda, the displays of dictatorial self-glorification, and him just kind of desecrating these symbols of republicanism, small-r republicanism, in the nation’s capital. Everybody just wants to be done with this—all these enmities, all these hatreds, all these degradations, all this nonsense already.Shephard: Well, yeah, I think that the U.S. team is a great example of this, right? Like, so I mentioned Balogun being a sort of birthright citizen, but you don’t have to know that to enjoy this team, right? They’re a fun team. And I think that they encapsulate a lot of what you would like to love about this country. If you’re a MAGA person, you could easily get into a kind of “USA, USA” version of this team. If you’re a liberal like myself, you can find a million ways to be excited about them, right? And I think that what you see about Trumpism culturally here is the inability to let those kind of monocultural things stand, right? You have to choose one or the other. Taylor Swift can’t be Taylor Swift, right? She has to be an enemy of the MAGA movement. Bruce Springsteen, same thing—which is, again, how you got the horrific music lineup at the Great American State Fair.But I think that you’re seeing a kind of resistance to that now as well, right? And I think that this is a sort of political movement dying out, in that it’s resisting Trump’s efforts to co-opt it. But it sucks to be in the end stage of that too, because he is, I think, really raging against the dying of the light right now, for lack of a better term.Sargent: Yes, I’ve been using the term “late-stage Trumpism.”Shephard: Yeah.Sargent: It really is—it’s got an end-stage feeling to it, an end-stage cult feeling. We’re in the middle of late-stage Trumpism, and everybody’s just waiting for it to collapse in on itself, basically. And I think maybe the ultimate tell here is for Donald Trump to inflate the crowd sizes at the 250th event, right, which is supposed to be all about the country. And one last time, he makes it about himself. He makes it about his own crowd sizes. It’s almost the final humiliation.Shephard: Well, yeah, and it’s how it all began, right? That was literally day one of the Trump administration, when people were saying, maybe this guy will be different. And you’re just like, nope. It’s just going to be an even dumber and worse version of what we thought. And now we’re just—it’s crowd sizes all the way down now. And we’ve got two and a half more years of this, and it’s going to be brutal. But, you know, again, it is the late stage.Sargent: Late-stage Trumpism, folks. That’s what America’s become. Alex Shephard, always a great pleasure talking to you, man. Thanks so much for all this. And you were really ahead of the curve on this stuff, I’m telling you.Shephard: Thank you. I appreciate it.

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“Religion is back in our country, bigger and stronger than it has been in many, many years,” President Donald Trump announced to the Faith and Freedom Coalition on June 26. “Religion’s really …”—he made a rocket-ship sound effect and thrust his finger skyward—“going up. If that were a stock, we’d be very, very rich, all of us.” Great nations have God and religion, and, he added, “if you don’t have that, it just doesn’t seem to work out, does it?” It sounded almost like a threat.That same day, Trump’s Religious Liberty Commission delivered a full draft of its 224-page report, the centerpiece of which is “12 Recommendations to Strengthen Religious Liberty for All Americans.” Those recommendations include the creation of a Justice Department “religious liberty task force,” production of “Know Your Rights” posters, repealing the Johnson Amendment, and creating “religious liberty violation reporting hotlines/online portals.”The commission, housed in the DOJ, was established via executive order last year to advise the White House Faith Office and Domestic Policy Council by offering suggestions for how to “preserve and enhance religious liberty” in U.S. law and public life. Chaired by Texas Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick and vice-chaired by Ben Carson, it is primarily composed of right-wing activists. A few have legal experience; others are prominent religious leaders, politicians, authors—and Dr. Phil. The report itself is, as legal scholar Micah Schwartzman has put it, “an embarrassing document” (although “shameless” might be more fitting). Still, as we have learned and relearned over the past decade, government officials do not have to be thoughtful, competent, or serious to do real damage. Slapdash and unserious as the report might be, it does its job: laying out how to use the cause of religious liberty to advance right-wing goals.For over two decades, the Christian conservative legal movement, led by well-funded groups such as Alliance Defending Freedom and with help from the Roberts court, has transformed the idea of religious freedom. The era of “high separation” between church and state is over, and free exercise is a tool reserved primarily for conservative Christians. If the commission’s recommendations are implemented with the DOJ’s backing, they will be the next steps in this broader project. Religious liberty is a banner under which the administration and its allies will continue to undermine other civil rights, dismantle public goods, and insulate certain favored citizens from public accountability.The commission’s report offers many legal and policy suggestions, but it also seeks a broader cultural shift. “Safeguarding religious liberty,” it claims, “requires more than defending legal rights after they have been violated. It requires cultivating a culture that understands why those rights exist in the first place.” This mission demands that Americans respect religious liberty and the rights it affords, but first they must celebrate and value religion itself. The premise of the commission’s work is “a simple but profound truth: religious liberty is essential because religion itself is indispensable to a flourishing society.” In recent decades, high-profile cases have dramatized the conflict between individual religious freedom and the public good. The religious belief and speech of cake bakers, website designers, and licensed counselors—to refer to three Supreme Court cases in which ADF successfully sought exemption from or contested Colorado’s civil rights laws—come into conflict with the civil rights of others, particularly LGBTQ people. But, the commission argues, the “Founding Fathers recognized that religious liberty is not merely a private benefit for believers, but a public good for the nation.” Here, they sidestep the fact that private benefits do in fact conflict with public goods—when business owners discriminate against their potential clients, when tax dollars are funneled to discriminatory private institutions and away from public schools, or when religious groups flout public health mandates during a pandemic—and instead assert that, because religion is ultimately good, religious liberty benefits everyone. If religion is “an essential aspect of what it means to be human,” as the report claims, then it follows that it would be privileged at least as much as, if not more than, other aspects of one’s humanity. Thus, those institutions that foster religion are not at odds with, or even really separate from, state institutions: Church and state should not be completely separate but, “in reality,” should “strengthen and support one another.” There is no wall between the two, the commission concludes, but a “bridge.”The report is divided into 14 chapters, most of which are devoted to a particular issue or arena of public life. Chapter titles include “Students Don’t Check their Rights at the Schoolhouse Gate,” “The Rights and Roles of Parents and Teachers,” and “Anti-Semitism.” The content of each is drawn largely from the commission’s seven hearings held over the past year. These hearings primarily served as platforms for supposedly persecuted believers—each one a potential “religious freedom celebrity”—to offer testimonials, with occasional subject-area experts adding their analysis. Some were claimants in well-publicized disputes, including cases brought by conservative Christian legal organizations, such as ADF and First Liberty Institute, whose Kelly Shackelford and Allyson Ho are on the commission. These anecdotes make up much of the report, the final recommendation of which is: “Honor the courage of religious liberty heroes through creating a Presidential Medal of Religious Liberty and First Freedom Hero Awards to recognize Americans who stand up for religious freedom and play an indispensable role in protecting citizens’ Constitutional rights.” Chapters conclude with pictures from the hearings of these heroes. It reads like a book of martyrs with policy recommendations. The testimonies reveal their uses. Twelve-year-old Shea Encinas testified that in fifth grade, his “school forced [him] to teach [his] kindergarten buddy about changing his gender using a book called My Shadow Is Pink.” Shea did not refuse. However, his family “spoke up” afterward, and, according to Shea, “the school treated us badly and kids started bullying me and my brother because of our faith and the school did nothing to stop it.” The school did not offer an opt-out of certain readings. Later, the school hosted a “Pink Out the Hate” day, on which students would wear pink to show solidarity with LGBTQ students. According to Shea, he “felt like the entire school …[was] standing against me and ridiculing my beliefs.” When he arrived, he was dismayed to see that “over half the school wore pink. I felt completely alone.” Shea and his brother were ostracized, and the family “felt they had no choice” but to enroll in a private school. Without discounting (or taking too seriously) Shea’s feelings, there is something poignant in stating so starkly that when he was not in the majority he “felt completely alone.” In the nation the commission hopes to create, Shea’s rights would not simply be protected; so too would his feelings. The commission wants Americans to be proud of religion, and of religious liberty. Perhaps even more than wanting to feel pride, they want some people not to feel shame. They want anti-sociality without consequent social stigma. As religious studies scholar Donovan Schaefer has written, for some conservatives, “it becomes easier to repudiate shame altogether than respond to the moral demands placed on them.” Following this line of argument, religious studies scholar Finbarr Curtis explains, “Trumpism is the response to the fear that someone somewhere is threatening to take something that is rightfully yours. As a vigorous response to threats, Trump’s illiberalism makes his supporters feel safe.” The message of the commission’s report is that these threats abound, from vaccine mandates and “transgenderism” and “bad actors in the government and within institutions,” but the Department of Justice will protect you. There will be posters reminding everyone to “Know Your Rights.” Your teachers will undergo religious liberty training. If anyone does violate your rights or make you feel unsafe, there will be an online portal where you can report the threat. They will be investigated.Even in this boom time for religious liberty, with religion’s stock going up, some claimants still lose their cases. In fact, the named claimant in Landor v. Louisiana Department of Corrections, the most recent religious freedom case at the Supreme Court, lost. And a landmark law—2000’s Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act, or RLUIPA—was significantly restricted. Naturally, it was a case that spelled out exactly who could expect to enjoy religious freedom and who should not.Damon Landor, by all accounts a devout Rastafarian, did not cut his hair in keeping with his faith. When incarcerated, he explained and documented this practice. For a while, his religious rights were honored. When he was transferred to a new facility, he handed them his paperwork stating his religious exemption. Prison guards threw it in the trash and then held Landor down and shaved his head. He sued the prison officials in their individual capacity, which the court found was beyond the scope of RLUIPA. Justice Neil Gorsuch, writing for the majority, held that prison employees could not be sued here because they had not “voluntarily and knowingly consent[ed] to answer lawsuits” under RLUIPA. As lawyer and legal scholar Elizabeth Reiner Platt noted, this is a standard that “employees are unlikely to agree to.” Why would they?The Religious Liberty Commission’s report—in a draft issued three days after the Landor decision—says DOJ “should issue updated guidance on how [RLUIPA] provides incarcerated individual with the right to receive reasonable religious accommodations while incarcerated.” To what end? With what effect? Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote in her Landor dissent that “state-empowered prison officials will have little incentive to abide by federal law.” It is hard to imagine that DOJ will effectively cultivate a culture of respect for religion and religious liberty in a case like this. Will prisons hang “Know Your Rights” posters in common spaces? Will wardens undergo religious liberty trainings that would prevent such an incident? Will incarcerated persons call the hotline? The recommendations seem to be for Shea Encinas and his parents more than Damon Landor.Some critics, such as Sarah Posner, a journalist and expert on the Christian right, have called the commission’s report “an homage to Christian nationalism.” As Posner notes, a multi-religious coalition legally challenged the commission, based on its nearly entirely Christian composition and clearly biased framing. Skye Perryman, president and CEO of Democracy Forward, said that the commission is “not about religious liberty, it is about pursuing a culture of Christian Nationalism that seeks to divide and isolate people across our nation.” The Public Religion Research Institute has found that 11 percent of Americans are “adherents” to Christian nationalist ideas and 21 percent are “sympathizers.” Christian nationalism is correlated with support for religion in general and “Judeo-Christian values.” In a 2021 poll on religious liberty, PRRI found that 10 percent of Americans completely agree and 21 percent somewhat agree with the statement, “In the U.S., when there is a conflict, the rights and religious freedom of Christians have priority over the rights and religious freedom of non-Christians and non-religious Americans.” Perhaps this is the “culture of Christian Nationalism” of which Perryman warns. About a third of Americans, then, support some kinds of favorable treatment for Christians. It is reasonable to think that the hotlines are for them—or, at least, that they’ll be frequent users.While Christian nationalist ideology might be a factor, the Religious Liberty Commission is better understood as a right-wing project. If its goal is to install Christian supremacy, it is only as a route to empower private actors to subvert the public good. It seeks to exempt certain people—Christians, yes, but more importantly conservatives—from public accountability, and from feeling bad about abridging the civil rights of disfavored groups. It advocates siphoning funds from public schools and rerouting them toward private institutions, or “creating a robust system of universal school choice” and “securing parental rights.” It encourages citizens to surveil and report, rather than tolerate, their neighbors. It recommends that DOJ “develop a dedicated Religious Liberty Task Force,” whose tasks would include issuing cease-and-desist letters to public school districts with trans-inclusive policies. It seeks to create a culture of fear and suspicion and, in so doing, alleviate the fears of anti-pluralists, their feelings of loneliness, exclusion, and shame. Throughout, the message is clear: Get religion. If you don’t, the commission suggests, it just doesn’t seem to work out, does it?

After the Supreme Court handed Donald Trump a major defeat by upholding birthright citizenship last month, an angry Trump took to Truth Social to urge Republican lawmakers to overturn it with legislation. “Congress should start TODAY,” Trump demanded, adding: “No long and unwieldy Constitutional Amendment is necessary!”That’s nonsense—five justices affirmed that just about all children born on U.S. soil, including those with undocumented parents, are citizens under the Fourteenth Amendment. But House Speaker Mike Johnson knows he must appear prepared to obey Trump’s command, so on Fox News Sunday, he declared that House Republicans are examining ways to undo what the Constitution says.“If there’s some legislative fix, we’ll advance that immediately,” Johnson insisted. Note the word “immediately,” which seems to mean “between now and Election Day.” Is this something vulnerable House Republicans will really want to vote on?Doubtful. Indeed, look carefully and you’ll see the beginnings of a pattern: Republicans like Johnson—who know this would be extremely unpopular—are conjuring up a new tone and new language designed to recast it as a modest step, and not as the radical upheaval it would truly represent. Just watch Johnson’s full quote on this matter:🚨 IT'S OFFICIAL: Speaker Johnson announces he's coming up with legislation to STRIKE DOWN rampant birthright citizenship and tourism scams for illegal aliensGOOD! Act fast!"I really enjoyed Justice Clarence Thomas' dissent, everybody should read that. And he explained that… pic.twitter.com/GT2z3kgeV6— Eric Daugherty (@EricLDaugh) July 5, 2026Birthright citizenship might require a mere “legislative fix,” Johnson says, because under it, citizenship has been “devalued” by “birth tourism.” That last phrase has long been a noxious rallying cry on the anti-immigrant right. But in Johnson’s hands, it’s meant to portray the birthright citizenship “problem” as no biggie, as a trivial matter that just needs a little patching up. And note the oh-so-casual tone he strikes throughout, as if he’s discussing an adjustment to marginal tax rates.Or take Vice President JD Vance, who recently described ending birthright citizenship in similarly bland terms. “It’s fundamentally a loophole that exists in our immigration system that rewards illegal aliens,” Vance said on Fox News Sunday. “There are a number of things that we’re already looking at to close that loophole.” Note Vance’s repetition of the word “loophole,” which seems suspiciously deliberate. Why, this would be a mere tweak—akin to a new coat of paint on the garage door or oiling a squeaky hinge, you see.Theoretically, Johnson and Republicans could write legislation that, say, prohibits the grant of citizenship to any babies born to one or two parents who entered illegally and/or were undocumented at the time of the birth. Right now, such a bill would presumably be upheld as constitutional by “only” four Supreme Court justices: Samuel Alito, Clarence Thomas, and Neil Gorsuch voted to overturn birthright citizenship on constitutional grounds, and Brett Kavanaugh sided with the majority but only on a statutory basis, not a constitutional one.That’s alarming. It means only five justices now believe birthright citizenship is a “foundational guarantee,” explains Slate’s Mark Joseph Stern, so opponents need only to “nab one more vote” on the court to create a majority to uphold a congressional statute ending it. So Republicans might try to pass something that might be invalidated now but could test the court again—and lay the groundwork for more efforts later, similar to how Roe v. Wade foes chipped away at it for years before succeeding.The irony to Johnson’s effort to make all this sound trivial is that the problem he identifies—people coming into our country solely to have a baby and scam the system into letting them stay—actually is very insignificant. A brief in the case by over 100 specialists in social science, demography, and other fields notes that the government’s own numbers put such births at far less than 1 percent of overall U.S. births. And even that low figure is almost certainly wrong: The real total, they detail, is far more “infinitesimal.”But the change that Republicans are contemplating would be a moral, substantive, humanitarian, and constitutional earthquake. As Amanda Frost explains, ending birthright citizenship could lead to hundreds of thousands of newborn babies per year going forward remaining undocumented. That would mean they have less earning power as adults, harming the economy. Alternatively, if they are removed (or not born here at all), that means a future of national demographic decline.Here it’s critical to stress that the overwhelming majority of those people would not be the children of “birth tourists.” They wouldn’t be the children of people who came here solely to have babies and are getting “rewarded” for this, as it doesn’t earn the parents legal status in any case. Instead, the parents constitute families already in the process of immigrating here for the same reasons immigrants long have done—to participate productively in our economy and communities and, ultimately, in our democracy.So while Johnson and Vance are aiming their rhetoric at “birth tourists”—an easy-to-demonize group—their actual concern is with the much larger class of people who want to settle here for reasons that are recognizably American. That’s who they want to keep out.Further underscoring the point, don’t overlook Johnson’s assertion that our citizenship is being “devalued” by birthright citizenship. Two of the justices—Thomas and Alito—used similar terms, insisting the children of undocumented immigrants “devalue” and “degrade” American citizenship more broadly. That’s extremely loaded language: As Adam Serwer notes, it echoes Civil War–era language about freedom for enslaved people “degrading” the white race, thus casting all those undocumented children as fundamentally “inferior” to other American-born children.Which is ultimately why all this strikes so hard at our constitutional order. Ketanji Brown Jackson’s concurrence forcefully points out that birthright citizenship enshrines the promise of equality in part precisely by overturning “bloodline” as the “marker” of belonging. The key is that the child’s status should not be hereditary. Vance and Johnson want to undo that, reversing what Jackson calls the Fourteenth Amendment’s destruction of “racial caste.”So let’s step back and really appreciate Johnson’s vile two-step. He claims in passing that birthright citizenship “devalues” American citizenship, casually endorsing a disgusting attack on the hallowed principle that a child’s status should depend on birthplace, not heritage or inheritance. Undoing this would be seismic, yet he frames it as a mere “fix” to “birth tourism,” making it sound benign to those who might not immediately appreciate the grand principles at stake here.“The new quote-unquote ‘fixes’ try to shift the public’s focus to the legal status of the parents, away from the geographical birthplace of the child,” Anna O. Law, a historian of immigration law, tells me. “For people who don’t know the history of the Fourteenth Amendment, it might sound plausible. But it would blow a huge hole in the U.S. Constitution. It’s deeply cynical.”It would also be deeply, deeply unpopular. A recent Fox News poll found that 69 percent of Americans think a kid born to an “illegal immigrant” (Fox’s language) should “automatically become a U.S. citizen.” That includes 65 percent of noncollege white voters, 61 percent of rural whites, and even 57 percent of white evangelicals. As Fox quietly reported in March (how often do you hear this finding on the network?), relative to previous years, support for it is up.To be sure, now that Trump and MAGA have taken up this cause, it might shift some Republican voters their way. Focus-grouping by The Bulwark’s Sarah Longwell shows some Trump voters are now echoing his own language about it. But still: It’s very, very doubtful that Johnson really wants vulnerable House Republicans to vote on such legislation before the midterms. Yet he’s now been pushed into the position of keeping expectations for a legislative “fix” alive with MAGA—all because he’s required to pretend Trump’s command for legislation is rooted in something real. And Vance will have to champion this when his presidential run starts next year, no matter how unpopular it remains. When he does, he’ll use euphemisms like “loophole” to mask how wildly radical and destructive it is. And it’ll be squarely on us to prevent him, at all costs, from getting away with it.